[Root Elevation]

If you’re sick of hearing about the rate at which Bristol is spurting out talented, interesting producers and labels these days, it’s obvious there will be no respite any time soon. Though you probably haven’t heard of him yet, Typesun’s been exerting himself in the Bristol underground for some time as part of the FallingUp collective, also comprising Punch Drunk’s Andy Mac, who’ve championed soulful and groove-ridden electronic music for years in their DJ sets and club nights. Luke Harney is now embarking on a flurry of more personal creativity. Alongside painstakingly completing an album and converting the Root Elevation brand of parties into a label, he has also just unveiled his 7 Arrows pseudonym, “the band I always dreamt of being in, but found out the hard way I had to bring into the world on my own.” This first single from the forthcoming LP, side-by-side with Guido and remixed by Peverelist, strongly reflects the Bristol scene’s atmosphere of mutual creative unity, as well as the disregard for strictly delineated genre boundaries that is being embraced by the UK scene at large, and by that city’s in particular.

“Heart Maths” is halfstep, though it puts too much emphasis on its intricate melodic ideas for it to be considered dubstep as such. It embellishes the purple aesthetic that Guido, with Joker and Gemmy, defined, meshing its conventions with more “grown-up” traits. The lead melody is detuned and layered, producing a jazz-indebted discordance, and a raw, eerie feeling of confusion. The same cascading arpeggios are traversed in turn by simple, fluttering keys and battered Casio presets; orchestral timp rolls and high-minded harmonies suddenly fall away to pixelated blares of saw-wave bass. Consequently, this feels like an experiment in mixing the gritty with the majestic, in its sometimes-awkward juxtaposition of appealing, stumbling dubstep grooves with a grandiose melodic narrative.

Surprisingly then, Peverelist’s remix represents the ever profound and unrestricted producer’s most decisive step toward deep house yet, and it perhaps shares as much affinity with his recently inaugurated Livity Sound project — comprising Kowton, Asusu, and himself — as with his 140 BPM-centric solo back catalog. Dissected parts of the original’s melody are sparsely and effectively arranged into a revolving motif around oxygenated hi-hat rhythms and a propulsive drum machine jack. Vaporized fragments of the original’s strangely-nuanced synths whirl enigmatically around this forward-motion rhythm. Peverelist masterfully tempers Typesun and Guido’s grand melodramatic airs with a genuine rawness in the spirit of early Chicago jack tracks. Vision and inventiveness are in abundance here.